Need to lower salinity in a hurry

I got a ich issue....

I know that there is 90 gallons in my system. How do I drop from 1.024 to 1.017 as safe as possible?

I use a hydrometer, backed up by my trusty refractometer!

1. Do I just add fresh water into system and measure?
2. What is the safest rate to reduce salinity?

I have a tang fetish and the fish most affected by this is my powder brown. He and the others are fed small portions 6 times a day. 2 nori clips and 4 auto feeds, approx 2-3 small pellets each.

 

You can keep taking water out and replacing it with ro/di water measure and repeat but this should be done slowly over a few days.
also you don't have any corals or inverts?

 

Best said like above just like a water change just add RODI H20 with no salt... one for one.. Good luck....

 

Is your fish eating? Tangs are notorious for getting ich. I personally would not drop the salinity down if the fish are eating. Often times they will get over it by themselves. Doing a hyposalinity is very stressful on the fish, takes time (several days) and I have read that it really needs to get down to 1.012 to successfully treat ich.

How long have you had the tang and how big is your tank. It sounds to me that you are over-feeding and that it is probably affecting the water quality. What is your parameters. Tangs will get ich due to poor conditions.

 

it doesn't heal the fish of ick it kills any of the babys in the water so they don't keep getting it.The lower salinity makes them explode. The ick that is already in the gills won't be affected by it(mature ick will release babys) and in a sense like Schackmel said the fish will heal itself. When my tang had ick years ago I did this in a last ditch effort I lowered the salt in a qt tank down to 1.017 for 4 weeks and the tang did finally heal and I still have him today.This was after all reef safe treatments failed.

 

If your fish are healthy, most ich cases are more of a "common cold" to fish rather than a deadly disease. Now, I know tangs are very very fragile when it comes to ich, but I'd look into doing something other than dropping the salinity of your entire tank.

First off, your title said "need to lower salinity in a hurry." Big no-no right there. Doing things in a hurry with a reef tank normally brings more pain than good. If you were to drop the salinity, it'd have to be over a course of several days, and would still be a tad stressful to everyone.

As someone has already asked, do you have corals or inverts in the tank? If so, hypersalinity can really throw them for a loop, and potentially whipe out your entire coral/invert population. Which no one wants to happen.

I would recommend finding an alternate treatment route for the tangs. I've never owned a tang, let alone a tang with ich, so this is just me throwing out naive suggestions, and I'm sure someone with more experience can chime in and help me out, but you could look at:

freshwater dips? Kills the parasite before it kills the tang. The bad thing is, some tangs like to "play dead" in this scenario. I read a very good article on freshwater dips that I wish I could find...maybe someone else will put one up.

Quaruntine and medication? I know this is a hard weapon to use on tangs, but maybe some meds, some time alone, and bumping up the temperature to 80 or so will help you out.

Raising the temperature helps speed up the ich development process, so in theory the ich goes away faster. This might be an idea to look at, but if you have any finicky/fragile critters in your main tank that can't stand a high temp or temp swing, raising the water temp should be done in a Q tank, not a main tank.

My damsel has/had ich in my mantis setup, and he's only been in the Q tank on API medication and 80 degree water for a few hours, and the white spots are already gone. I'm not sure how tangs react to medication, and some people have views where they don't ever want to use chemicals, so I'd research more on that. We aren't a fan of chemical anything in the main tanks in our house, but in the Quaruntine tank with a sick fish, anything that can cure him is fair game.

My two cents. Hope it helps.

 

Thanks guys... Water params are perfect. A little high on the cal, I have reduced the feeding to nori clips. I dont think tank size is an issue its a 90 gal corner tank. For coral I have some Kenya Tree and some Mushrooms, which can be easily moved to my other tanks, but I will not reduce salinity.

Should I keep lights on or off?

I noticed that my pork fish is hard at work eat up whatevers bothering the other tank mates.

 

Why are you thinking of moving the coral? You are dealing with ich, right? Leave the coral alone. The more you disrupt the tank the more stress you create. The lights have no effect on ich either. Let the system run as-is and if you want add Kick-ick or Rid-ick, both have proven effective and should not harm anything. Also, add some stress-zyme or other stress coat product to help with the sloughing of the slime coat.

 

If the tang is eating try soaking it's food in some garlic or vitamin C. This will boost it's immune system and help it get over the ich faster.

If you do hypo do it in a seperate tank and drop the salinity no more then .2 per day. Other wise osmotic shock can occur. You will need to drop it all the way down to 1.009 and keep it there for at least 4 weeks.

When raising the salinity back up do no more than .1 per day. Raising is much harder on fish than lowering...

Make sense?

If the fish is eating I would just med it's food though.

 

I would rather quarantine the fish, and do a FW dip, followed by a copper treatment. Tangs tend to lay on their side when stressed during the FW dip, but we were able to keep them swimming longer with each dip. The first dip wasn't even 2 min before we had to take the yellow tang out . He was able to go longer and longer with subsequent dips -til about 12 mins, when he started coming to the surface for air). During FW dips we were constantly moving water around to increase water flow through the gills, to dislodge the parasites.

FW dips with my powder blue tang are more painful cos hes fluttering around in the net and hurting himself. Just make sure temperature of water is the same for the FW dip (I microwave water) and quarantine tank.

Let your main tank go 'fishless' for 2-4 weeks during which time then parasite will run its cycle without a host and die.